Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Seems obvious right? The ice is melting, so build a series of big mobile freezer boats to produce new blocks of ice. Good enough idea for a geoengineering prize.

Iceberg-making submarine aims to tackle global warming by re-freezing the Arctic

Alyn Griffiths

A team of designers led by Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha proposes re-freezing sea water in the Arctic to create miniature modular icebergs using a submarine-like vessel, in a bid to combat climate change.
The Indonesian designer worked on the prototype with collaborators Denny Lesmana Budi and Fiera Alifa for an international competition organised by the Association of Siamese Architects.

…

“The main goal of this idea is to restore the polar ecosystem, which has a direct effect on the balance of the global climate,” said the designer, adding that in this scenario “it is better to prevent than cure“.

…

The submarine-like vessel would submerge to collect sea water in a central hexagonal tank. Turbines would then be used to blast the tank with cold air and accelerate the freezing process.

During this process, the vessel would return to the surface of the sea and the tank would be covered to protect it from sunlight. A system of reverse osmosis would be used to filter some of the salt from the water in order to speed up the process.

Once the water is frozen, the vessel would submerge again, leaving behind an “ice baby” with a volume of 2,027 cubic-metres. These miniature icebergs would then cluster together in a honeycomb pattern to form a larger ice floe.

…

Read more: https://www.dezeen.com/2019/07/27/refreezing-the-arctic-geoengineering-design-climate-change/

The concept video;

There is a slight flaw with this idea – what do they plan to do with the waste heat?

Refrigeration, reverse osmosis, pumping heat, all takes a lot of work. Both the latent heat of fusion extracted from the water to turn it into ice, and the waste heat from the freezing process, will have to be dumped somewhere.